Accidentally-on-purpose, he bumped against me at a rooftop barbecue in a Stepney warehouse conversion. Laid the Hugh Grant charm on thick as we sipped warm, fruity Pimm’s from Mason jars. Canary Wharf gleamed and ached, beautiful, behind him. He had seemed too much, then, as though he were caricaturing himself. Over the ensuing months and years, I began to appreciate the elastic nature of his personality. I watched him jostle and mess about with his close friends. Debating big ideas with bigger words and a brutal sense of group humour. They poked fun at one another mercilessly, then chortled: bent over, knee slapping, in a near-parodical show of mirth. After, in the back of a minicab, he’d greet the driver by name and navigate expertly from idle chit-chat to unlocking a life story. He asked thoughtful followups and never interrupted. He was polite, yes, but not stuffy. He softened his accent. Said, ‘Good night, man,’ sincerely, punctuated with a clasped two-hand handshake, before climbing out of the car.
‘This is nice,’ he said finally, almost smiling. And it was. Tomorrow seemed further away. Though the upcoming weekend with his parents still loomed large; their anniversary party hosted at the family’s country estate. What should have felt, if not casual, then at least pleasantly exciting, was instead rapidly materializing into hard reality. I nodded, and he turned to face the cars lined up at the crossing.
‘I’ve been – I mean my ex.’ He paused, then started again. ‘My ex has been texting. She got a puppy.’
A puppy? I repeated, turning the syllables over. His ex would be at the anniversary, too, I knew. She was a childhood friend, virtually a part of the family, as his mother had phrased it. They’d grown up together frolicking across the English countryside like Colin and Mary Lennox. Looking at him, crouched there on the grass, with his cheeks and watery eyes contorted into an approximation of stoicism – I felt a curiosity, I wanted to know.
‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned the puppy.’
Our second bottles were empty. The background chatter had swelled to a buzz of only occasionally dissonant rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb. I asked to see the puppy, if he had a picture. He set down his bottle and stared at me for a while.
‘Just forget about the puppy,’ he said.
We took the District Line back to Putney. The declining sun smouldered behind chimneyed rooftops as we walked along quiet roads from the station to his house. Reading before bed, he smiled sideways over his Kindle at me. Later, as he slept, I watched his chest sink and swell. Heard his occasional, wheezing snores. He’d thrown off the bed sheet and lay on his back in a cherubic pose: left foot against right knee, right arm bent around his head, fingers spread soft on the pillow. Cock pink against his thigh. Gravity smoothed his forehead and cheeks and I recognized the boy-ish, pouting face from his driving licence.
Did I prefer this to sleeping alone?
My neighbours’ lives were tangled up in their partners. They’d cleaved from their parents and unto each other, sharing bills, food, rent. I did not imagine they could easily separate. We had no such obligations. But we still visited galleries, watched plays, attended parties, hosted parties, travelled, cooked, together. We said we. This seemed a necessary aspect of life, like work. Or exercise.
‘It’s the principle,’ Rach had told me, earlier that day. ‘Fuck the sexism – harness it!’
Rach was adamant that her entanglement with one of the firm’s global department heads was in fact her prerogative: to reclaim and subvert the narrative of workplace harassment. They were getting serious. Moving from formal praxis to something resembling mundane, genuine emotion. Living together. It was both simpler and more complex than my own relationship.
We had our usual table at the mezzanine coffee point above the office lobby. Rach’s nails, peachy-manicured as always, tip-tapped against her almond latte. We’d slipped from co-workers to friends over the last year as her father recovered from cancer and my grandmother died of it. She was a Home Counties, Kate-loving, Jaeger-shopping, Lean In-feminist who arranged animal-welfare fundraisers at the weekends and bought handmade earrings from Etsy. She once called me in tears from the Hermès store. It’s all too beautiful, she’d sobbed in halting syllables as the shop assistant packaged her scarves.
‘Victimhood is a choice,’ Rach said. Part opinion, part mantra. She insisted on continual improvement: evolution, learning, growth, smashing through all ceilings at all costs. She said there’s a new victim every day. Didn’t my MD just get axed for fucking around with that intern in Legal? She shook her head at such reckless, stupid hubris. This was how our conversations invariably went.